For Nell Zink ’85, the course of literary life never did run smooth. After graduation, she worked first as a bricklayer with Jack Peet Masonry in Williamsburg and then as a secretary in Washington, D.C., before moving to New York, Philadelphia, Israel and Germany, finding work as a translator.
Through it all, Zink was writing. But she wasn’t always writing for a reader. “I knew that writing was something that I did, that I’d always done and would always do, but it never occurred to me that anyone else would want to read it,” she says.
People do want to read Zink’s writing. So much so that three of her novels — “The Wallcreeper,” “Mislaid” and “Avalon” — became New York Times Notable Books and one, “Mislaid,” was longlisted for the National Book Award.
In April, she received a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction, becoming part of the 100th class of fellows supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The prestigious award recognizes Zink’s previous contributions to fiction and potential for future success. (James Dwyer, Arthur B. Hanson Professor of Law at William & Mary Law School, was also awarded a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship, for his contributions to the field of philosophy.)
Zink was born in California and moved to Virginia’s Tidewater region when she was 8 years old. She documented her observations of the region’s social norms and prejudices in her novel “Mislaid,” which follows a woman crossing sexual and racial boundaries in the mid-20th century.
In “Mislaid,” the main character, who is white, assumes a Black identity for herself and her younger child to escape her failing marriage. “I wrote that book just to process the weirdness of Tidewater in my childhood,” Zink says.